Up this morning at 0630--- ridiculous for a Saturday. The pettable little K-dot at citydress used to tell me that I needed to sleep in on weekends, that I needed to teach my body how to sleep again. I did get up and shower and walk up the hill to the little corner grocery for a fresh biscuit and coffee. I don't feel like eating these days, but there is something comforting in the ritual of buying coffee and a biscuit there in line at the little red-painted corner grocery. Hipsters and retirees, girls doing the Walk of Shame--- the grocery there at 0800 at least has a semblance of being a Place With Regulars. I'm really not planning on eating today, but buying black coffee and a biscuit is at least being part of a breakfast ritual.

Last night around 0130 the bikini girl in Nr. 110 came out by the pool and sat in a deck chair and talked on her keitai for a good hour and a half. I could see the glow of her cigarette from my window--- she sat in the chair and talked and smoked and drank. Tank top and bikini bottom, long, slender bare legs. Sometime around 0300 I got up from the couch and looked out the window. She'd lost the tank top and was lying back topless in the dark water. All shadow and the hint of motion in the water. She's in her late twenties, tall and very slender--- a runner's body, a girl who goes out and does five miles every evening. I know her first name, and I know she manages a mobile phone boutique. And I know that she brings home a series of gym-toned boys with shaven heads--- a depressing enough thought. In the dark there at 0300 she was a beautiful shadow there in the water: long legs, gaunt hipbones, flat hard stomach and small hard breasts. I do admire her for being topless in the pool. (I do wonder if Ginny at ginny_mccoo or Lissy at emigree ever swim topless in hotel pools...) But she's only a ghost. The bikini girl in Nr. 110 has never spoken to me, and we live in worlds that never intersect. She's a ghost in dark water. She lives in a world as distant and alien as the one where the blonde sugarbaby/escort girl across the street in the blue-grey house lives. Girls swimming topless in dark water, a girl climbing into Older Clients' Jaguar sedans--- those are worlds beyond mine. Stella at stelladellasera in Miami or Lisbon, Ms. Flox in all her adventures on Oahu, Ms. Chang in the Keys and at her university--- those worlds were always beyond mine. The ghostgirls here are just as distant, but there's that disheartening sense of faux-proximity.

Kelsey at clush writes that she's now a certified combatives instructor. That's impressive, though scary. A tall, gaunt, beautiful, wickedly clever girl who can do close-quarter combatives? There's always the fear that an attempted kiss would be deflected with a strike just under the sternum, or that any sexual failure would result in the girl smashing you to the ground and leaving you to the paramedics.

Kelsey says that her combatives class is taught with all the students and instructors in ACU outfits--- the new Army Combat Uniform. The ACU isn't so very different from a martial arts uniform in fit, and it is of course what her students would be wearing if one day they had to do close-quarters combat with insolent, gibbering Mahometans.

The ACU Kelsey wears is done in a new digital-pattern multi-purpose camouflage pattern. I used to be something of an aficionado of camouflage--- desert camo in particular. I always liked the old "chocolate chip" desert camo from 1990/91, and I still have a parka in that pattern. The British desert-pattern DPM--- I liked that, too. I do have a digital-desert pattern ACU shirt somewhere. I used to wear it as a light jacket; I remember wearing it to the suburban library on autumn mornings.

I'd like to see Kelsey in her ACU--- I'd especially like to see Kelsey in nothing but an ACU shirt. She's tallish and leggy and slender and taut and sharp-hipboned, and with beautiful eyes. She's had lovers and one-night stands there at the army base where she works. Someone has seen her late at night there in just a digital-camo pattern shirt. But Kelsey is a girl who exists in another world--- not one where anyone like me could ever have a tangible presence.

On 08 August of the Year Four I wrote:

Longitude has written small, allusive, fascinating entries about her affair with an older lover of her own. I suppose I'm too sensitive to the melancholy part of affairs like that. I've almost always been the Older Lover, the honey hawk. And I'm always the one who gets left behind. It's something I've said before: too many girls have seen me as a kind of Theme Park Thrill Ride. They can have the wicked and transgressive affair with the Older Lover, trade beauty for knowledge ("blow jobs for book lists", Lacey once said) and then step off the Thrill Ride. I'm the one who falls in love and gets left behind. And of course it all feeds my icy hatred of Other (Younger, Buff) Males. I was never desired for my flesh; I was only and ever desired for what I knew. And now I don't have even that. I will never be like Pfablo, the wealthy-exotic-athletic faux-husband of Zelda at I-Cleave. Girls do become wet over a Pfablo; no girl has desired me in this century. And people wonder why I order bottles of absinthe and have shochu shipped in by the case.

I still believe that. And I do miss Zelda at I-Cleave. She left that journal to become Gestures at Blogspot, and then...vanished like Keyser Soze, there in January of the Year Five. Her last entries talked about going to a couple of inaugural balls in DC and being aggressively drunk/slutty, and about being arrested by TSA goons in a dispute at the DC airport. Poof... Never seen again. I miss the raw sexual anger and savage wit in her entries. Zelda Kim, she called herself. I do wonder who she was--- was she anything like the Korean girl with the biomechanics M.Sc. she claimed? Whoever she was--- where is she now?

Kelsey at clush writes that as part of her combatives training, students would sit and an instructor would come up behind and choke them unconscious. Kelsey described it as "fucking trippy", and noted that "it took him two tries to get me to pass out because my neck is so small! i kept coughing before i finally went out, and everyone said it was freaky as hell because i twitched and my eyes never closed. when i came back to, a huge tear ran down my cheek. That's...scary. Though it does remind me of Anne Boleyn's remark to the Warden of the Tower just before her own execution: she'd heard that the executioner was very good indeed, and "I have but such a small neck." I could ask Kelsey--- though I won't ---whether she's ever done erotic asphyxia. I could ask Stella at stelladellasera that, too.

I've known a couple of girls--- Lexie, Elizabeth-Claire, Angela ---who liked breathplay, either with a partner or solo. I think Ms. Flox at besideserato wrote once about doing erotic asphyxia. (Yes--- I do want to ask Melissa at kraftig_bewegt whether she does breathplay with clients or autoerotic asphyxia at home in Williamsburg) It's not something that I've ever really done--- not least because ("X-Files trivia) Fox Mulder is fated to die during autoerotic asphyxia. I just wonder if Kelsey found asphyxia in any way...hot. And I wish I could ask girls like Lexie or Ms. Flox about erotic asphyxia, about their own stories. I have no idea what any of the sensations would be like--- though the smart thing is only and ever to know at second-hand.

The combatives thing may have one bad effect on Kelsey. The music that gets played at what she called The Fighthouse is all speed metal and rap-rock. I do fear that Kelsey will begin to associate speed metal and rap-rock with Sex Music--- just as I fear that Kelsey will start taking up the vocabulary and style of high-testosterone contact-sport young males. Kelsey seems to have had a rib cracked in combatives practice yesterday, and while it's one thing to have it taped up and then go on with training--- I've known swimmer and runner girls who did that without missing a beat ---I do worry about her description of training: i think it's amazing to grapple with people, to get pounded into the mat and have your limbs all twisted up and shit...and bodies just... rollin'. I liked it better when she was an ethereal, literature/film girl in her 2004-2007 journals and 'zines. I just don't hear Kelsey's voice doing the hardcore thing.

Sarah in Georgia--- Tooths at D-Land ---is a keen paintballer. The postgrad girl at Oxford used to fence with sabre. Even Melissa at kraftig_bewegt did competitive tennis all through high school. I'll go out in the evening and swim laps alone. But I've never been...physical. Or at least I've never been...competitive. Swimming laps is physical, but it's not about competition or contact. And, yes: the same is true about writing a doctoral thesis. You put yourself into it, and you focus everything on it. But it's not competitive. You're playing against the thesis committee, not against other PhD candidates. I'm not competitive--- or I'm not competitive against anything other than the standards in my own head. I'm not...adversarial. Not a good thing for a Rechtsanwalt. I lack anything like the killer instinct a barrister needs.

Note: yes--- I would like to do paintballing. I think I would like that. And sabre--- or kendo ---does appeal to me. I'll have to talk with Sarah about that. It's just a pity that there's no paintball variant of the sabre and lance for people with cavalry fantasies.

An entry for 04 August 04:

I can imagine opalescent streaks of chilled water swirling through a pitcher of absinthe... I can imagine watching the whorls and deriving arc-tangents and co-secants... And I can imagine the taste on parted lips-- Maegan's, say... or DRL's...or Alessandra and her friends Maddie and Alice... I wonder if a girl might hold a sugar cube in her teeth and let me drip absinthe over it from my fingertips... It's vur' much something I'd ask Maegan... or [Umi at ivich] ...to do.

I've never done that. Not yet, and probably not ever. I do think of what Ms. cataplexis would do with the image, and I recall that the Wicked Adventure Lissy at emigree had in Stockholm this spring was fueled by absinthe.

A Saturday morning note from the Year Four:

This morning there were small Thylacines in yachting caps on my patio.

"Hullo!" I said.

"Hullo!" said the pleasant little Thylacines. "We are still not extinct."

"I am glad," I said. "But why are you wearing yachting caps?"

"We are Tasmanian Tigers," one little Thylacine said. "We must get from Hobart to the mainland by maritime travel."

"And we like regattas," said another.

"True enough," I agreed. "And regattas are fun. You can join the small, fez-wearing wombats on their catamarans."

The small Thylacines looked rather spiffy in their yachting caps. I am vur' glad that our non-extinct Thylacine friends live in the wood behind my house. I expect that little Pete the Awesome Battle Bear at Lourspete (D-Land) and his friend Katie would like Thylacines. And Pete would vur' much enjoy walking in the wood behind my house.

I do wonder if small maritime Thylacines ever sign in at regattas as "Ralph Hythloday"...

Our little non-extinct Thylacine friends are most spiffy, whether sailing catamarans to Hobart or trading palladium futures on the NYMEX or donning their Sith robes to fly box kites with the Vice-President and me at the Undisclosed Location. Yay, little non-extinct Thylacines!

I'm thinking of cocktails this afternoon. That brings up the Manhattans Alessandra at bel_ebat and her friend Alice at a1icey used to mix on summer afternoons in the Year Four:

Alessandra tells me that she and her Manhattan-by-way-of-English-boarding-schools friend Alice (lovely accent, lovely legs) plan to open a school: Alice & Alessandra's Academy of the Oral Arts. They plan to make a fortune teaching prep-school girls the techniques that just might guarantee them rich husbands. I totally love the idea. And I wrote Alessandra that even if the school doesn't work out, the two of them can make a fortune selling "Alice & Alessandra's Academy of the Oral Arts" t-shirts (cropped baby tees, I'd think) on line. [One day... I *must* inquire further as to their own skills level....]

Alice, Alessandra says, spends her days sleeping, smoking, reading, mixing Manhattans, and sailing. I have to admire her for that. Sailing, now... I wonder if she ever joins our small fez-wearing wombat friends as they sail their sleek, high-tech catamarans across the Gulf of Carpentaria...

...Alessandra writes about her friend Alice... Lovely, transatlantic, moneyed, leggy, sent down from Wycombe Abbey for having valium and whiskey in her room, literate, a wonderfully baroque family history, skilled at the oral arts. The girl's biography is to die for. It's a perfect biography for the dust jacket of a first novel. And of course it's a biography that makes me want to sit over drinks for *days* with the lissome young Alice and just devote myself to listening to her stories and commentary and taking notes in my Moleskine... I told Alessandra that I will be buying Alice's first novel whenever she finishes Rice and gets published.

I'm still hoping to read the novel.

I don't want to do lunch, really. I might just go down and try to get a tan. And then go off and see if anyone is at the Zeppelin Pilots' Club for drinks.

I'll be back here tonight, of course. Nowhere to go, and no girl to go with. I can swim laps, then drink and read. The bikini girl from Nr. 110 may or may not swim topless again after midnight. I may be able to look down at her from a darkened window, but I'll never speak to her. Ghostgirls, ghost worlds, all the impermeable barriers between my fingertips and a girl's collarbones...

I do wonder if Kelsey misses the girl she dated after she left GWU. I wonder if she looked there in Korea for someone to do what YrMartyr offered for a lover--- fuck the sorrow out of your bones...

I hate bright summer Saturday mornings. They only and always remind me that no one is willing to do that for me. No one ever will be.